Bern has the most climate-friendly building stock

Martigny VS , September 2022

Heating and hot water in buildings are an important factor in the climate strategy due to their high energy consumption. The city of Bern has the most climate-friendly building stock of all major cities. This shows an analysis tool developed by Navitas Consilium.

Navitas Consilium has developed an interactive tool to show the share of renewable or imported energy in the building stocks of each municipality in Switzerland, the Martigny-based energy and climate consultancy informs in a press release . The amount of greenhouse gases generated by the building stocks can also be called up using the tool. With its development, Navitas Consilium wants to help determine the need for decarbonization of building stocks for the implementation of the Swiss climate strategy.

An interactive map can be used to show that the most densely populated areas of the country use a low proportion of renewable energy compared to rural areas. With a share of 28 percent, Lausanne is still the best of the ten major cities. For Switzerland as a whole, the values vary between 2 and 84 percent.

At almost 40 percent, heating and hot water in buildings account for a very high proportion of total energy consumption. For the implementation of the climate strategy, Navitas Consilium therefore considers a reduction in energy consumption in combination with the use of low-emission renewable energies to be essential.

The city of Bern is currently one step ahead when it comes to the climate-friendliness of its building stock. With 23 kilograms of CO2 equivalents per square meter per year, Bern has the lowest emissions of the ten largest cities in Switzerland. Zurich and Basel follow, each with 24 kilograms of CO2 equivalent per square meter. In general, cities with less than 10 percent energy from renewable sources have comparatively high emissions of greenhouse gases.

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